The Grip of Culture: The Social Psychology of Climate Change Catastrophism.

Book Review

The Grip of Culture: The Social Psychology of Climate Change Catastropism by Andy A. West, 8 June 2023, 448 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1838074746. Published by: GWPF. Paperback: £10 | E-book: free

GWPF publish at least 3 brilliant books with tendentious links to anthropomorphic global warming, AGW; AKA: 'climate change'. This book (Grip of Culture), Population Bombed (2018), by Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurkmak, and Searching for the Catastrophe Signal, by Bernie Lewin. I say 'tendentious link' because neither book is about how the climate works; but all 3 books explain how the climate issue arose to dominate the mindsets of global elites. These books explain how the climate mindset works.

• Searching for the Catastrophe Signal, 2017, by Bernie Lewin
• Population Bombed, 2018, by Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurkmak
• Grip of Culture, 2023, by Andy West

Searching for the Catastrophe Signal plays back the history of the IPCC: International Panel on Climate Change. How it first warped itself in the early 1990s - before CimateGate), and before it matured into the dishonest, globalist, elite-dominated, propaganda group it is today.

Population Bombed traces the origins of climate hysteria back to old (eitist) eugenic concerns such as the hoi polloi out-breeding the better classes. Especially tbe 1960's blossoming of eugenic-derived ideas under a new flag: over-population, which, itself, hid behind a 'new movement': environmentalism.

Andy West's 'Grip of Culture' even manages to eclipse the previous two essential reads! It is one of the most important books, I've ever read. Likely: the most important. I've always been fascinated by ideologies, since the age ten, when I asked myself the question: why should I believe in God, but was unable to satisfactorarily answer myself. My mid-teen econcounters with Scientology, and Hare Krishna, cememented my fascination. BTW: I even worked 3 days, for free, with Scientology - marking their psychological profile tests - they gave people; until I realized the tests were a scam to hook people into Scientology.

The Grip of Culture explains religions, cults, and ideologies as necessarily false narratives about the world. These systems exist to unify people around common ideas, and causes; to give us a sense of belonging and purpose in life. It's nominally about the climate crisis narrative (as it's subtitle implies), but Andy makes it clear, everthing he says applies to all cultural memes. Andy West has a fascinating argument as to why such cultural memes (idea sets) are necessarily false. The Grip of Culture is centred in modern social psychology. Such psychology applies scientific research methods (empiricism), and bases itsef on ideas derived from evolutionary biology (evo-psych). Andy's book eschews the waffle, and groupthink of the poitical, journalist, and activist classes. Yet, if anything, the book's mood, tradition, or culture, go back the the hey days of the 18th century Elightenment, to works such as Denis Diderot's, Letter on the Blind, and Letter on the Deaf and Dumb. To books which lead us to question everything we've been taught, told, and allowed to think.

So one might suspect that the usual suspects: progressives and radicals would be all for such a book. Not necessarily because it's ideas are true. But because, like Nietzsche, or Foucault - even if it's false: we need need to know it. Yet there's a deathly silence within 'progressive culture' regarding this book. The Grip of Culture, also calls out every progressive cause: climate crisis, socialism, woke, DEI, CRT, transmania. Every cultural movement is placed under the spotlight. Exposure to the glare of these ideas vapourizes them like vampires in daylight. So progressives and radicals are banned from reading this book because it presents ideas too far.

It is a more revolutionary read than anything philosophers dreamt up. More life-changing then Pomo, Socrates, Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche. Because the ideas presented within aren't just those of clever people taking side-sweeps at the world. Andy makes empiricst claims. This is how the world works and there's nowt one can do to change this world because it's man's world.

Footnote

Better classes. This was once such a common phrase among elites that Hollywood and its ilk turned it into a cipher (code word) for everything they disliked about elites. Such that the instant any actor uttered the phrase better classes to refer to those whom they preferred, for example, in a 1930s to 1970s movie, one knew they were the cultural badies - snobs. Yet, strangely, the internet does not know such a code-phrase exists, so I must footnote it here! Eugenics erases its own history.